For
my wonderful blog audience I read Hitler's Mein Kampf. Fortunately I
am a fast reader. The key chapter is Volume 2 chapter 1, the
philosophy of the NAZI party. Hitler's writing is obtuse in the
extreme, he makes verbose 19th Century Irish politicians look blunt.
Bloviated is a good descriptor.
I felt compelled to read this book because several conservative writers have recently said the the Nazis were a Left-wing party and a recent book by a Lefty Englishman says the opposite, that the Nazis were right wingers. In a simple summary: both sides are disingenuous, dishonest wing nuts. They are both wrong.
I also read Mein Kampf because of my University of Chicago training. The U.of C. believed, when I was a student, that college students are intelligent enough and competent enough to read and understand the original documents around which our civilization is formed. So I went directly to the founding document of the NAZI party; Mein Kampf.
Hitler's NAZI party was organized around one
principle: Germans were the master race. Everything else was secondary.
Germans according to Hitler were Aryans, Aryans were the ordinary folk
and folklore of Germany. All other people were inferior.
According to the Nazis, Reds and communists were promoting a Jewish racial agenda of hegemony. Jews and Reds believed that there were universal human values and that all people were potentially part of a common society. To Hitler that was nonsense, the Aryans were the masters of everyone else.
Got that. It is really simple and really clear.
The British appeasement of Germany could never have worked and the American military victory over Germany could never have been negotiated. Pacifists will never learn.